Looking at the Moon

It's been ten years. Technically, your recorded death date is four days from now. That's when your family pulled you from the machinery. However, I was there that night after your rollover, looking upon you battered and bloodied frame. Your body spasmodically working to push out your unborn son who would die in your mother's arms. My experience in transplant helped me recognize the obviousness of your situation; the lights might have been on, but you were not home. You were not so much my friend as family. Oh, how you could piss me off to the point of wanting to spit coffin nails. To throttle you and never speak to you again. Yet when things came down, if I needed you, you were there with a fury and without hesitation. When my mother was diagnosed terminal, when, a year and change later, she died, you were one of the few to call. An online comment, a text, would have been too impersonal, you said. When I announced I was done with city life and heading to the mountains with that woman I'd been running around with, you were one of the few who thought I hadn't totally lost my mind. Although I know it is vanity to second-guess the dead, I like to think you'd be behind me on this zany scheme we've concocted involving a tropical island. Your dying inspired a mantra I still use when things go pear-shaped; it's not okay. It's not going to be okay. It just going to be, and what will be is not what any of us expected. Perhaps that was your last lesson to teach me... It's been ten years. You were far more family than my friend. Like family I have lost, you do occasionally show up in my dreams. Like them, you are missed more than all the words in all the languages could ever describe.